From The Journal archives: R.I. Liberians' high hopes for Taylor lost to bloodshed

The embattled president, who has family ties to Rhode Island, was once regarded here as the West African nation's best hope.

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By
MICHAEL CORKERY
Posted Jul. 25, 2013 @ 4:40 pm

This story was publsihed July 26, 2003†

On the night of Sept. 15, 1985, Charles Taylor escaped from the county jail in Plymouth, Mass., by sawing his way through an iron window bar with a hacksaw. He had been awaiting extradition to Liberia on an embezzlement charge, but the former government official wanted to return to West Africa on his own terms.

Leaving a wife and family behind in Rhode Island, Taylor made his way back to Liberia, where he amassed a rebel force, overthrew the government, was elected president and headed a regime accused of theft, brutality and war crimes.

Earlier this month, President Bush told Taylor to step down. But Taylor has yet to leave.

It's been nearly 18 years since Taylor escaped from the Plymouth County jail and went to Liberia. Most of his family members left Rhode Island and followed him to Africa.

But the shadow of Charles Taylor, 55, still looms large over the state's Liberian community - one of the largest in the nation, totaling about 7,000 people.

Today, that community will celebrate the 156th anniversary of Liberia's independence, the birth of an African nation founded by freed American slaves, with a news conference at 1 p.m. at the office of the Liberian Community Association of Rhode Island, at 807 Broad St., Providence.

Community leaders will mark the date with a news conference in Providence, urging the United States to intervene in the latest violent crisis to consume Liberia. It's a crisis that many Liberians blame, in large part, on Charles Taylor.

Many criticize Taylor for perpetuating the fighting in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone and hoarding much of the country's assets for his inner circle.

"Charles Taylor should leave," said Saah N'Tow, a Liberian native, who lives in Providence. "He should have left yesterday."

RHODE ISLAND'S LIBERIANS had high hopes for Taylor when he went to Liberia and waged a civil war against then-President Samuel K. Doe in 1989. N'Tow recalls the scene in Liberia on the day Doe was killed.

"Everyone was dancing because they thought the war was over. But the war was just starting," said N'Tow.

Even after he was elected in 1997, Taylor continued to fight, meddling in the affairs of Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The violence created a new wave of Liberian refugees to Rhode Island. They joined a group of immigrants that had been living in the state since the early 1980s.

Tiah Nagbe came to the United States in 1999. He would not discuss the circumstances of his departure from Liberia because he says he fears reprisals against his family still living there. But he is willing to say this: It's time for Taylor to go.

"The government has collapsed completely," said Nagbe, a member of the Liberian Community Association of Rhode Island. "The legislature is not sitting. The supreme court is not sitting.

"With this situation, the Liberian people are not secure in their capital. One should not ask the question of whether [ Taylor] should leave; he has to leave."

Local Liberians say that Taylor's ex-wife Enid Tupee Taylor, formerly of Pawtucket and Central Falls, returned to Africa and has not been seen in Rhode Island for years.

Most of Taylor's other immediate family members have left the state; Others maintain a low-profile here, they say.

Liberians, who have been working for years to raise awareness about the violence in their homeland, worry that Taylor's government could harm their families in Liberia.

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OVER THE YEARS, Taylor had inquired about efforts among Rhode Island Liberians to gain permanent residency for Liberians living in the United States. Sen. Jack Reed became their champion on this issue in the Senate.

"[ Taylor] called to make inquiries about what is going on in Rhode Island," said Moses Saygbe, a former president of the Liberian Community Association who now works for Atty. Gen. Patrick Lynch.

"We were advocating that the country was not safe enough for people to return. He understood it as us targeting [his] government."

Saygbe said many Liberians who have returned home to visit family are careful not to reveal that they traveled from Rhode Island. "Anyone who went from Rhode Island was seen as an enemy of Liberia," said Saygbe. "They had to go discreetly and leave discreetly."

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TAYLOR WAS BORN and raised in a suburb of Monrovia. His father descended from freed American slaves who were sent to Africa in 1822.

Taylor earned an economics degree at Bentley College, in Waltham, Mass. He returned to Liberia after college and then came back to New England, where he was arrested and held on the Liberian embezzlement charge.

In Liberia, Taylor has earned a reputation as a brutal warlord of a president. The 14-year civil war has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced more than a million.

Taylor fueled the conflict, not only in Liberia, but in Sierra Leone, where he is accused of supporting the notorious Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, a rebel group known to cut off the hands of its enemies. The groups fighting Taylor now include his rivals during the civil war.

"People will say he has a messianic, highly developed ego," said Herb Howe, a professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.

Or he could be motivated by greed. "He seemed to have sticky fingers," Howe said.

Taylor was charged in 1984 with embezzling nearly $1 million in Liberian government funds and arrested in Somerville, Mass.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Boston alleged that Taylor diverted the money from the Liberian government to a fictitious New Jersey corporation. He escaped from the Plymouth jail while awaiting extradition.

In Liberia, Taylor has been accused of communicating with al-Qaida operatives regarding the illegal market in diamonds from Sierra Leone.

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"THE CIA will debate the specifics. But most will say that Charles Taylor and diamonds and al-Qaida are closely linked," Howe said.

The Rev. Philip Nelson, pastor of the Grain Coast Fellowship Chruch, in Providence, said he used to know Taylor's mother and father in Liberia, but he had never met Charles. He blames Charles Taylor for much, but not all, of the country's troubles.

"I believe with every breath that I breathe that the situation is a spiritual sitution," Nelson said, adding that Liberians have strayed from Christian ideals.

As anti- Taylor rebels besiege Monrovia, the president's days seem numbered. But many Rhode Island Liberians say as much as they want him to leave now they worry about what happens in his absence.

N'Tow and others say that peacekeepers, preferably from the United States, should be deployed to Liberia before Taylor departs.

"There is no real plan on the ground for the power vacuum if he leaves," he said.

Howe agrees: "People say once Taylor goes everything will get better. But there is no successor. Once Taylor goes, you will have to rebuild the political culture and keep those armed guys away from each other."

Taylor could make yet another escape.

He has been indicted by a special court for alleged war crimes in Sierra Leone. Observers say Taylor is looking for a way out of those charges before agreeing to leave Liberia.

"Others say he's a fighter and will go down with the ship," said Howe. "I believe he's a consummate survivor."

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LIBERIA in TURMOIL

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Facts and figures on Liberia and its war:

HISTORY: Escorted to West Africa by American soldiers in the 1820s, freed American slaves founded Liberia in 1847. Africa's first republic, it was for decades sub-Saharan Africa's richest country, thriving on U.S. investment in rubber plantations and elsewhere.

DECLINE: A leading American ally in the Cold War, Liberia saw its ruling American- Liberian elite overthrown in 1979. Since then, with the end of its Cold War strategic value, the country has fallen into chaos and decline.

U.N.-Sierra Leone court announced Taylor's war-crimes indictment on June 4 for alleged support of rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone.

POPULATION: 3.2 million; 5 percent descendants of former American slaves. Aid groups estimate virtually entire population displaced by war under Taylor at one time or other.

REBEL CAUSES: Neighbors Guinea and Ivory Coast alleged to back campaign to oust Taylor, blaming him for Liberian incursions and overall regional instability. Fighters, many of them combatants from 1989-96 civil war, bear grudges against Taylor over that power struggle, and his grip on power and resources since.